Living Lutheran: Renewing Your Congregation

Living Lutheran is the best selling book by Dave Daubert that helps your congregation explore a missional identity and dig into its sense of purpose and guiding principles. With clear chapters and each chapter including a set of discussion questions; Dave provides a practical how-to guide that will enable church leaders to help individual congregations walk through the process for themselves. Creative and informative, the book provides a straightforward approach that helps congregations reclaim their core identity for the 21st century. Includes questions for individual or group reflection and an additional resources section. Because it is filled with stories from the field, it is engaging and easy to work through. Living Lutheran also includes an appendix that outlines a retreat that you can do with your leaders or all the members of your congregation in order to get the content to develop your own purpose and guiding principles for the congregation where you belong. Plus, this book is just as useful for people of other Protestant faith traditions to do the same work in their congregations as well!

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Your Message: This is a great book! I have long loved & read aloud to loved ones Dave Daubert's articles from Living Lutheran (i.e., "Nice is Not Enough" June 2015 is eternally relevant). So when I saw he had a book I grabbed it right up. Any congregation could use it to start a discernment process. I like his use of very human stories that illustrate missteps as well as successes. He's an excellent writer & story teller. I quote this book often: "Vision is God's dream for our future." And: "The majority of people who talk about the future can only envision it by using building blocks and images from the past." Each chapter concludes with Reflections for Discussion with scripture, prayer, conversation-starting questions and a discernment activity (e.g., Work in silence: "If God had God's way with our congregation for 5 years, what do you see in the future?" Don't use comparative terms in your answer). My congregation is in transition, so I've been reading dog-eared sections again, and recommending it to our congregation. I don't know why I said 4 of 5 - I haven't field tested the process yet, I guess - it's probably a 5 of 5. Because Dave Daubert sure is.